Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Mary Meehan and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY HERBERT S. STONE & CO.
This edition published July, 1906, by Duffield & Company
Refinement had more power over the soul of Valentine Cresswell thanreligion. It governed him with a curious ease of supremacy, and heldhim back without effort from most of the young man's sins. Each agehas its special sins. Each age passes them, like troops in review, beforeit decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided tojoin any regiment. The trumpets of vice rang in his ears in vain, mingledwith the more classical music of his life as the retreat from thebarracks of Seville mingled with the click of Carmen's castanets. But heheeded them not. If he listened to them sometimes, it was only to wonderat the harsh and blatant nature of their voices, only to pity the poorcreatures who hastened to the prison, which youth thinks freedom and oldage protection, at their shrieking summons. He preferred to be master ofhis soul, and had no desire to set it drilling at the command of paintedwomen, or to drown it in wine, or to suffocate it in the smoke atwhich the voluptuary tries to warm his hands, mistaking it for fire.Intellectuality is to some men what religion is to many women, a trellisof roses that bars out the larger world. Valentine loved to watch theroses bud and bloom as he sat in his flower-walled cell, a deliberate andrejoicing prisoner. For a long time he loved to watch them. And hethought that it must always be so, for he was not greatly given to moods,and therefore scarcely appreciated the thrilling meaning of the wordchange, that is the key-word of so many a life cipher. He loved thepleasures of the intellect so much that he made the mistake of opposingthem, as enemies, to the pleasures of the body. The reverse mistake ismade by the generality of men; and those who deem it wise to mingle thesharply contrasted ingredients that form a good recipe for happinessare often dubbed incomprehensible, or worse. But there were moments ata period of Valentine's life when he felt discontented at his strangeinability to long for sin; when he wondered, rather wearily, why he wasrapt from the follies that other men enjoyed; why he could refuse,without effort, the things that they clamoured after year by year withan unceasing gluttony of appetite. The saint quarrelled mutely with hisholiness of intellectuality, and argued, almost fiercely, with his coldand delicate purity.
"Why am I like some ivory statue?" he thought sometimes, "instead of likea human being, with drumming pulses, and dancing longings, and voicescalling forever in my ears, like voices of sirens, 'Come, come, rest inour arms, sleep on our bosoms, for we are they who have given joy to allmen from the beginning of time. We are they who have drawn good men fromtheir sad goodness, and they have blessed us. We are they who have beenthe allegory of the sage and the story of the world. In our soft arms theworld has learned the glory of embracing. On our melodious hearts thehearts of men have learned the sweet religion of singing.' Why cannotI be as other men are, instead of the Saint—the saint of VictoriaStreet—that I am?"
For, absurdly e